After the 1660 restoration of James's older brother Charles to the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland Talbot began acting as agent or representative for Irish Catholics attempting to recover estates confiscated after the Cromwellian conquest, a role that would define the remainder of his career.

Tyrconnell continued as a Jacobite supporter of James during the subsequent Williamite War in Ireland, but also considered a peace settlement with William that would preserve Catholic rights.

Talbot was controversial in his own lifetime; his own Chief Secretary, Thomas Sheridan, later described him as a "cunning dissembling courtier [...] turning with every wind to bring about his ambitious ends and purposes".

Recent assessments have suggested a more complex individual whose career was defined by personal loyalty to his patron James and above all by an effort to improve the status of the Irish Catholic gentry, particularly the "Old English" community to which he belonged.

As an adult he grew to be unusually tall and strong by standards of the time: the Mémoires of the Count de Gramont described him as "one of the tallest men in England and possessed of a fine and brilliant exterior".

[5] In September 1649 he was part of Aston's Royalist and Confederate garrison besieged in Drogheda by the Parliamentarians; he survived the wholesale massacre of the defenders by being so badly wounded he was assumed to be dead.

[5] Talbot fled Ireland and vanished from records, re-emerging in Madrid in 1653, where he served as a captain in the Spanish army alongside other Royalist and Confederate exiles.

[7] Talbot was threatened with torture and moved to the Tower of London; that night he spent the last of his money plying Cromwell's servants with wine before climbing down a rope to a waiting boat and escaping to Antwerp.

[5] Over the next decade, Talbot used his influence with James to cement his position at court: he began building links with others, like the Earl of Orrery, who were hoping to supplant the "Old Royalists" such as Ormond.

Many among the political class feared a return to the violence of the Civil War and there was widespread rejoicing at the orderly succession; Protestant-backed rebellions by Charles's illegitimate son Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll were quickly put down.

[12] James rewarded Talbot's loyalty by creating him Baron of Talbotstown, Viscount Baltinglass and Earl of Tyrconnell (3rd creation),[13] sending him to Ireland as commander in chief of the Irish Army.

[5] Nevertheless, Tyrconnell pressed ahead with the appointment of Catholics to most Irish government departments, leaving only the Treasury in Protestant control: by issuing new borough charters he was able to rapidly Catholicise the local administration in preparation for a future sitting of Parliament.

[17] Between William's landing in Devon in November in the Glorious Revolution and James's flight from England on 24 December, Tyrconnell was faced with a series of challenges in Ireland.

[18] He made it known he would consider disbanding the army and resigning if Catholics could be guaranteed their position as it stood at the end of Charles's reign; William seems to have been minded to accept the offer, but Tyrconnell subsequently decided against negotiation.

[5] In January Tyrconnell issued warrants for an enormous expansion of the Irish army by 40,000 men, giving commissions to the Catholic gentry to raise new regiments.

However, at this critical moment, Tyrconnell fell seriously ill, meaning he was unable to attend the Parliament he had spent so long working towards; he did not return to public life until August.

[5] Tyrconnell's absence meant that Parliament rejected his original fairly moderate bill for repealing the Act of Settlement, intended to placate Protestant opinion.

When in August William was forced to raise the siege of the Jacobite stronghold of Limerick, Tyrconnell seemed to be proved wrong; he sailed from Galway in October, hoping to exert influence on James and the French and gain a better peace settlement by prolonging the war.

After neutralising from his sickbed an attempt by the "War Party" to discredit him at James's court in exile, he arrived at Galway in January 1691, where many of the increasingly war-weary Irish were glad of his return.

[5] Rather than risk splitting the army he returned to Limerick, thereby avoiding responsibility for the loss of Athlone on 30 June or the catastrophic Jacobite defeat at Aughrim on 12 July, where Saint-Ruhe and thousands of others were killed.

[5] Tyrconnell re-established his authority at Limerick by demanding Jacobite officers swear a collective oath; however, he died of apoplexy on 14 August following a "merry" dinner with Saint-Ruhe's former subordinate d'Usson.

[24] Talbot made many enemies in his own lifetime; leaving little in the way of correspondence, for many years historians were compelled to rely on the letters of political adversaries such as Ormond or Clarendon.

[6] The Whig historian Macaulay depicted him as a liar and bully, calling him a "cold hearted, farsighted, scheming sycophant", while even J. P. Kenyon, writing in 1958, described him as a "bogtrotter" who spoke for the "rapacious, ignorant, anarchic forces of Irish Catholicism, at the lowest stage of civilisation in western Europe".

[17] Recent historians have more sympathetically assessed Talbot as pursuing a realistic and attainable plan to return the Irish establishment to Catholic control, while his admitted vices are seen as reflecting the court circles in which he operated.

[17] His biographer Lenihan has written that while Talbot "could have lived uneventfully and comfortably [...] he was driven (and that is not too strong a word) to use his high connections to redress a communal and national grievance".